Review: Preview ruins Symphony No. 4 surprises

Mar. 18, 2013

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The Des Moines Symphony tackled Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 this weekend, which may not mean much to you if you never memorized all those title numbers.

That’s OK. Just think of the composer’s “1812 Over­ture,” which the orchestra plays each year around the Fourth of July. The fireworks in Symphony No. 4 are the same.

Keep in mind, though, that part of what makes those fireworks exciting is the anticipation, which is why the Beyond the Score program at the Des Moines Civic Center wasn’t quite the spectacle it could have been.

The musicians played well under maestro Joseph Giunta’s direction Saturday night, but they repeated the main themes during the first-act history lesson just enough to spoil some of the surprise during the start-to-finish reading after intermission. Too many Roman candles ultimately dimmed the grand finale.

But let’s give credit where it’s due. The Beyond the Score format, which was developed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, blends video footage with live music and narration to explain how a particular piece of music was written. This was the Des Moines Symphony’s third BTS program (after Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony in 2011 and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in 2012), and it was their best attempt yet at unveiling the mysteries of the composer’s creative process.

In this case, much of the source material comes from letters Tchaikovsky wrote to his wealthy patron, Nadezhda von Meck, who was paying his bills. Composers are notoriously bad at describing their own work, but Tchaikovsky was an exception, and as the program made clear, he had a lot to tell her.

While writing the Fourth Symphony, in 1877, the homosexual composer married a young woman against his better judgment and stayed with her just 10 days before fleeing Russia for Switzerland and Italy. He attempted suicide before pulling himself together to finish writing the score, which seems to mix his own inner demons with the broader sweep of Russian life — the glittering nobility, the starving peasants and the early rumbling of the revolution to come.

The actors Robert Berdahl, of Minnesota’s Guthrie Theater, and Michael Boudewyns, a Des Moines native now in Delaware, read from scripts and did a great job with multiple voices, bringing to life both Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries. (They even made the music critics sound like pompous loons, which must have been difficult.)

They worked seamlessly with Giunta, who helped the orchestra to interject bits of music here and there before playing the whole piece straight through. This isn’t a score that runs on autopilot, and Giunta smoothly adjusted to its abrupt changes in tempo and mood. It’s also not a piece that sounds good on a stereo without constantly changing the volume, but the orchestra whispered and shouted with admirable success. Their best bit came in the third movement, when the strings plucked through an extended pizzicato with bright, focused effervescence. (The history lesson compared it to a balalaika.)

Giunta singled out the brass and woodwind sections for applause at the end of the night, and they deserved it. The brass sounded especially clear and bold whenever they repeated the opening “Fate” fanfare, but it’s too bad they had so many chances to do it.